Over
the last 25 years,the boundary between feminism—
the conviction that all women have a right to full social, economic
and political citizenship— and the individualistic ideology
of choice— a belief in self-determination and the
freedom of self-expression— has become exceptionally permeable. In
fact, in today’s market-oriented culture, the popular definition
of feminism (which the remarkable Katha Pollitt describes as “feminism
lite”) is typically summarized as a woman’s
right to choose. The trendy new mantra of “choice”
still fits its original application— to establish and preserve
women’s legal right to end an unwanted or unsafe pregnancy.
But it’s also summoned to settle such disputes as whether
or not “real” feminists wear lipstick and push-up bras,
undergo cosmetic surgery, change their last names when they marry,
or become stay-at-home moms. As Summer Woods writes for Bitch
Magazine:

For many young feminists,
“choice” has become the very definition of feminism
itself— illustrated by the standard-bearing right to choose
abortion and supported by the ever-advertised notion that they
have choice in everything else in life as well. The cult of choice
consumerism wills us to believe that women can get everything
we want out of life, as long as we make the right choices along
the way— from the cereal we eat in the morning to the moisturizer
we use at night, and the universe of daily decisions, mundane
and profound, that confront us in between.

The lure of “empowerment”
through personal choice also resonates for those who are hesitant
to self-identify as feminists— and recent opinion polls show
that many egalitarian-minded women fall into this camp. Lately,
affluent mothers have turned to the language of “choice”
and “options” to justify their work-life arrangements—
whether they are employed full-time, part-time or remain at home
to care for their children. Yet the media’s recent focus on
highly-educated, mostly white, professional women who “choose”
to trade in their promising careers for full-time child-rearing
tends to overlook workplace practices, social conditions and cultural
forces that limit mothers’ occupational advancement and exacerbate
their inequality. When it comes to work and family, the flimsy rationale
of “choice” is most damaging when it obscures the legitimate
needs and concerns of mothers who are essentially “choiceless”
because they lack the resources that make family-friendly work “options”—
and many other life opportunities taken for granted by more privileged
women— possible.

Historian Rickie
Solinger, author of several critically acclaimed
books on reproductive politics in the United States, believes that
the substitution of “choice” for the more substantial
concept of “reproductive rights” has broad repercussions
for American mothers. In an era when effective contraception and
safe abortion are presumed to be universally available (although
as Solinger explains in Beggars
and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Abortion, Adoption
and Welfare in the United States, federal
and state laws now limit poor women’s access to both), the
ideology of choice determines which mothers— and which children—
are viewed as “worthy” in the eyes of society. Making
“good choices” about whether or when to become a mother—
a concept, Solinger notes, that “evokes women shoppers selecting
among options in the marketplace”— is an opportunity
reserved for women with the right combination of social and economic
resources. Women without some or all of these assets— a degree
of maturity, a good education and/or marketable job skills, work
that pays a living wage, a husband or another dependable source
of supplemental income— can only make “bad” choices
by expressing their sexuality and fertility. “Bad” women
who make “bad” choices—who may be poor, young,
unmarried, women of color, or all of the above— have been
savagely stigmatized by politicians and pundits as selfish, uncaring
mothers whose illegitimate choices jeopardize the health and well-being
of their children and society as a whole.

The sharp separation
of mothers along race and class lines— a divide that determines
which women are valorized for their motherhood and which ones are
vilified for it— leads Solinger to pose a troubling question:
“Do Americans want motherhood to be a class privilege? A life
experience only available to middle class women?” The
MMO interviews Solinger about her work and the perilous intersection
of motherhood, race, class and choice.

MMO:
You’ve
worked with artists to create companion exhibitions for two of your
recent books, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race
Before Roe v. Wade and Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics
of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion and Welfare in the United States.
Why did you decide to take this unique approach,
and how have the traveling exhibits contributed to changing awareness
about the intertwining issues of motherhood, race, and class?

R.
Solinger:I found my
career as a historian a little late in life. But once I finally
discovered my life’s work, I became passionately devoted to
combing the archives, reading old newspapers, scouring government
documents. I was very moved, unearthing voices and other details
that showed, for example, how laws that forbid females from controlling
their own bodies had shaped the lives of girls and women in the
United States. Right away, I knew it was important and meaningful
to find— and write about— politicians and other authorities
who claimed that some women produced “valuable” babies,
but that the babies of other women had no value and cost taxpayers
too much.

I was completely catalyzed,
writing about how and why different groups of women had different
reproductive experiences in the United States, and what race has
had to do with these differences. I wrote about how and why these
experiences changed over time. I wrote about how our recent past
has clarified the fact that women’s legal capacity to manage
their own bodies has always been key to their status as full citizens.
I felt relatively useful and fulfilled writing books about the politics
of fertility and the politics of motherhood.

But soon, as a fundamentally
political person, I began to think about the limited audience I
was reaching with my academic-style books. And then, at just about
this same time, I got the chance to be an Associate of the Rocky
Mountain Women’s Institute in Denver. Here was a chance that
changed my life. (And it’s worth noting that I was about 43
years old at this time— a great example of how wonderful life-changing
moments come along at many different and unexpected ages!) The group
of Associates in my year— a photographer, an installation
artist, a sculptor— decided to take up the inspired idea of
one of the artists, Kay Obering: that we should make a collaborative
piece of art, a room-sized installation based on my books —
Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v.
Wade (1992, 2000) and The Abortionist: A Woman Against
the Law (1994). This exhibition, “Wake Up Little Susie:
Pregnancy and Power before Roe v. Wade” opened in 1992 on
a university campus in Denver. Kay took up the job of keeping this
exhibition on the road. Over the next decade, she booked the show
into fifty-six college and university galleries, from Maine to New
Mexico, from Oregon to Florida.

In 2001, just before
my book, Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes
Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States was published,
Kay and I began to curate a new exhibition, “Beggars and Choosers:
Motherhood is Not a Class Privilege in America,” a photography
show including the work of many of the leading documentary photographers
in the United States. This show is meant to respond to the decades-long
string of ugly images of women who occupy the reviled categories:
women who we are meant to see as too young, too poor, too gay, too
disabled, too non-white, too foreign, to be legitimate mothers in
this country. These ugly images have been fed to media-consumers,
making a strong case that certain women have no business becoming
mothers. In the exhibition, women who appear to occupy the reviled
categories are there in the photographs clearly engaged in being
loving, attentive mothers— with strength, dignity, and determination.
The show makes a strong political point. And it presents an absolutely
stunning collection of photographs.

With this second show,
I am achieving a new goal, one that the “Susie” show
helped define: I am working with faculty and others on each campus
to find ways to use the exhibition while it’s on campus as
an occasion to “interrupt the curriculum.” “Beggars
and Choosers” has provided opportunities for new courses,
film series, symposia, lectures, and other events that press members
of the campus community to rethink what they “know”
about who makes a legitimate mother— and who decides. The
exhibition becomes an occasion for offering social justice perspectives
and good information about the experience of mothering in the United
States in the early twenty-first century. “Beggars and Choosers”
opened at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in 2002 and has
been traveling to campuses since then. The show is booked for the
next couple of years and will have a long traveling life.

Just recently, I have
started designing a new exhibition, “Interrupted Life: Incarcerated
Mothers in the United States.” (This is the first time I will
curate and travel a show on a subject that I haven’t first
written a book about. I am working with a great team of experts—
some of us will edit a book about incarcerated women.)

I am convinced that the
curriculum must be interrupted by reconsiderations of the causes
and consequences of incarceration policies in the United States.
With the new show, just as with the others, I am expressing my hope
(and intermittent faith) in democracy. I am using art together with
scholarship to enrich opportunities for public and institutional
education. I am contributing to the project of a well-educated citizenry.